They held the house until the last possible minute before the performance of Map Me. Passholders, ticketholders, and standby fliers all grew a little restless waiting to get in—but once we filtered into the theater at the IFCC, we understood. There, lying naked in the middle of the bare black stage, lit only by the blue-white frame of a video projector, were performers Charlotte Vanden Eyne and Kurt Vandendriessche. It became clear that we were in for some serious shit.
As the show begins, the performers’ backs create a projection surface on which we see almost imperceptibly shifting images of their bodies. The texture of skin, a fingerprint, a nipple, parted lips. In this protracted moment, we are seeing all of the parts that make the whole, decontextualized (until you remember that you’re seeing them projected onto their very vessel of context).
The contours of their pale bodies pick up the video images so differently from a standard screen: the images take on the contours of the body and shimmer with the unexpectedly vibrant color of flesh superimposed on flesh. They shift positions and Vandendriessche is seated with his back to the audience; Vanden Eynde lies upstage, legs open around him. A projected image of her hands emerges at his neck and slinks down his back. Her fingernails etch the surface of his skin and leave sharp, clear lines which build and then are rubbed away. Her fingers dig into his back, pushing and pulling and your rational brain realizes that it’s a video projection, that she’s working with clay, that this is a part of the art. And even so, the trenches drawn by firm fingers are disturbingly visceral and intimate.
Continuing, subtitled vignettes explore small corners of intimacy and relationships. Vanden Eynde becomes a chest of drawers. Vandendriessche is a broken structure reconstructed. The video projections on their bodies are disturbing, enthralling, absolutely unnerving and engaging.
Mid-way through, the video filter is abandoned and the artists manipulate each other directly. Until now, they have been gently pushing at the walls around us and with the segment called “Join Me,” they knock a few down and insist on continuing. He ties strings to her nipples; she ties strings to his cock and balls. They each hold the strings and manipulate them, working up into a cat’s cradle mess and weaving their way out again.
“Join Me Again” takes the audience from “My, wasn’t that European” to “What the fuck” almost instantaneously, as the pair wrap their heads in plastic bags and packing tape to seal off their vision and bind their heads together in a disturbing wasp-nest-like creation that forces them to move together in order to move at all. Here, the performance’s only music comes on abruptly—a tarantella during which they reach for and away from each other.
The metaphors here are of course the difficulty of finding and maintaining “self” when you have also found an “other” who shapes your self while you also shape theirs, simply by the very fact of walking down a path together.
Stark, unnerving, and occasionally really fucking creepy, Map Me charts the contours of human relationships in an utterly unique, absolutely riveting way. The hush of the audience as we filed out spoke volumes about the fact that this piece is one that will resonate in ways we can’t know or expect…but that we’ll feel and remember as we go about the work of our daily lives. Much like the business of forging identity itself.